After graduating from the University of Chicago, Garwin joined the physics faculty there and spent summers as a consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory working on nuclear weapons. Garwin was the author of the actual design used in the first hydrogen bomb (code-named Mike) in 1952.[2] He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible.[3] He also worked on the development of the first spy satellites, for which he was named one of the ten founders of national reconnaissance.[4] While at IBM, his work on spin-echo magnetic resonance laid the foundations for MRI;[5] he was the catalyst for the discovery and publication of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm, today a staple of digital signal processing; he worked on gravitational waves; and played a crucial role in the development of laser printers and touch-screen monitors.[5] He has been granted 47 patents and has published over 500 papers.[6]

^Brennan, Jean Ford, The IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University: A History, IBM, Armonk, New York, February 18, 1971. Cf. pp.31-43. "By the end of 1952, Richard L. Garwin, a former pupil of Professor Enrico Fermi, had come to the Lab from the University of Chicago where he had been an assistant professor of nuclear physics."